Ubuntu
xpdf package

xpdf cannot find Helvetica font while evince can

Asked by Bill Hammond

fully updated Ubuntu 8.04.1 (desktop)

The version of xpdf retrieved through aptitude and installed in /usr/bin cannot find fonts like Helvetica, Helvetica-Bold, Helvetica-Oblique, Courier, and ZapfDingbats. The distribution version of evince is fine. Fwiw I notice that evince is linked to libfontconfig, while xpdf is not. Backing out poppler-utils and substituting the conflicting package xpdf-utils did not resolve the issue.

Test document: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/coursematerials/linux/intro-slides.pdf

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Hemanth (hemanth-hm) said : 		#1

The first uses the Synaptic Package Manager to install fonts from the Ubuntu repositories.

Or , manually

"gksu nautilus /usr/share/fonts/truetype" {paste it in terminal without quotes}

orThe easiest way to install a truetype font is to press alt-F2 and enter the following code (this will open nautilus in the right directory):

gksu nautilus /usr/share/fonts/truetype

Then create a new directory, name the directory whatever you like (choose a name that you remember if you ever need to backup your fonts personal fonts). Copy the fonts into that directory and finally rebuild the font information files by pressing alt-F2, mark 'run in terminal' so you can see the progress and entering the following code:

sudo fc-cache -f -v

Have a look at this : https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Fonts
And this : http://ubunt2.blogspot.com/2008/12/pdf-to.html

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Bill Hammond (gellmu) said : 		#2

Hermanth,

Thanks for your reply.

Alas, you have not addressed my question:

* I HAVE suitable fonts.
* Evince can find them.
* Xpdf cannot find them.

That is the problem. Presumably xpdf needs a suitable font mapping file that is missing from its package.

But all of a sudden now I see that I cloned my ~/.xpdfrc from a distribution that was neither Ubuntu nor Debian. That was my badness. (The font mappings are in
/etc/xpdf/xpdfrc which is fronted by ~/.xpdfrc.) So fixing the personal rc fixes the problem.

Sorry for the noise.

  -- Bill